Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Moor Mother & Billy Woods “Rapunzel”

Child Actor’s track for “Rapunzel” has an eerie vibe but a relaxed feeling, like you’re getting hypnotized into some kind of zombie state but it turns out to be a relief to give up control. A lot of that effect comes from the central sample, which blurs a few sung notes into a siren call that’s simultaneously lovely and unnerving. Moor Mother and Billy Woods are both well-suited to the feel of this track but approach it differently – Woods putting his own spin on the more cerebral Wu-Tang styles of Inspectah Deck and Masta Killa, while Moor Mother leans into the low end of her register so her gravelly tone melts in with the bass a bit.

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Glass “Mosie’s Mood”

“Mosie’s Mood” sounds as though the music is somehow backlit, like we’re just getting a dull haze of light off the back of its alt-rock groove and surfy lead guitar parts. The darkness of the music feels imposed on the form, like this really ought to have a bright and crisp sound but there’s something blocking out all light and joy. It’s a good tonal match for the lyrics, which seem to grapple with a lack of motivation and a surplus of anxiety in a time when possibilities are limited and mostly are bleak. There’s a sense in the music and the words that there’s an attempt to get out of a feeling of hopelessness, but there’s only so much that can be done.

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Apifera “Four Green Yellows”

Apifera sound like they’re going for a mid-’70s Herbie Hancock aesthetic here, though the loose swing in his classic recordings is just beyond their collective reach. But the tightness of their playing isn’t necessarily a problem as it nudges them a little closer to electronic music, particularly the sort of approximations of jazz fusion artists like Luke Vibert and Squarepusher were playing with around 20 years ago. “Four Green Yellows” has a nice relaxed groove, but the best bits aren’t exactly chill – a high keyboard part with a staccato attack that makes it sound like it’s blinking in the shape of a square, the way the bass seems to suddenly start fluttering around the two minute mark.

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Jazmine Sullivan featuring Ari Lennox “On It”

Jazmine Sullivan plays a supporting role in the first third of this song, giving a lot of space for Ari Lennox to set the tone for this very lusty slow jam. It’s generous, but it’s also sorta like having a very good opening act – once Sullivan takes the lead on the second verse she raises the stakes with a performance that’s twice as filthy, more emotionally raw, and impressively nuanced in terms of phrasing. I love the way she delivers the line “cause baby it’s not that easy to please me, yeah I’m needy,” stressing the internal rhyme of the “y” sound with notes that flatter the high end of her range while also conveying a bit of eagerness and desperation. As the song reaches its climax the two singers support one another beautifully, with each showing off and emoting without getting in the other’s way. They don’t sound like they’re competing, they sound like they’re comparing notes.

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Black Country, New Road “Track X”

Every aspect of “Track X” comes across as deliberate and refined, but not so much that it ever seems stiff or precious. It wouldn’t be too hard for this song to tip in those directions, particularly as it’s essentially a solemn spoken word piece set to an arrangement that includes strings and woodwinds. It’s careful where it counts – there’s no clutter to the track despite how many instruments are on it, and as much as the music is lovely and cinematic it never gets sappy or sentimental. Isaac Wood’s vocal performance resembles the style and tone of The National’s Matt Berninger, but he’s not quite as stoic and ponderous, not even when he’s ruminating on a complicated relationship with his father. The song feels like a minor miracle for the way this young band sets themselves up to make something that ought to be a bit unwieldly and overbearing but end up with something that’s rather light and elegant.

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Stephen Malkmus “Vague Space”

Stephen Malkmus went through a phase in the late 90s and early 00s in which he clearly felt a natural pull towards writing traditional romantic pop songs but felt weird and self conscious about it, so any time a melody suggested a sentimental cliché he wrote in something absurd or off-putting to subvert the listener’s expectations. You can hear this on “You Are A Light,” “Spit On A Stranger,” “Major Leagues,” and “Ann Don’t Cry” on Terror Twilight, and very obviously in “Vague Space” from the first Jicks record. This isn’t all conjecture – early versions of these songs have been in rotation for ages and the demo version of “Vague Space” featured on the “Phantasies” single features an early version of the chorus that goes “I love to turn you on” before it was revised to “I love to tear you off.” The editing process was pretty transparent.

There’s a part of me that sees this as a cop-out, a way of shrinking away from genuine emotions because you don’t want anyone to accuse you of being corny. But that impulse to shrink away from feelings, to put up a flimsy defense – that’s a very relatable feeling, and “Vague Space” is definitely a song about hedging emotional bets and playing it cool. The first verse is a dodge on a “define the relationship” conversation that includes a genuine compliment that’s also a neg – “I came to crave your spastic touch, the honest way you move’s too much,” and the second verse drifts into poetic nonsense, as if to say “haha, never mind.” As it goes along Malkmus tries to downplay everything – “this is no new romantic blitzkrieg” – but the sound of it all makes it obvious that he’s coming from a sweet place and just hates dealing with pressure. The “vague space” is a comfort zone, a way to enjoy feelings and moments without any particular responsibility. It’s not necessarily the most noble thing, but it’s an understandable position.

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Darkside “Liberty Bell”

The feeling of “Liberty Bell” is very easy to connect with but difficult to name – it’s numb but not too numb, bleak but not too bleak, cold but not frigid. It sounds like a journey into unknown territory with a lot of caution and fear, but also a dim hope that you may come upon something extraordinary. The arrangement is excellent, particularly the use of acoustic guitar as much for ambiance as rhythm and the lead guitar part that starts as a bit flamenco before devolving into an odd clatter.

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Playboi Carti “Slay3r”

Playboi Carti’s best songs feel like things that shouldn’t work – raps that don’t sound like raps, melodies that aren’t quite sung, chaotic energy that somehow coheres into pop forms. There’s an internal logic to what he does, enough that a lot of the tracks can sound basically the same, but when he really clicks it’s like magic. Every element of “Slay3r” sounds like it’s moving in nearly parallel circles, just off kilter enough to feel a little goofy and strange but not enough to distract from the bits that congeal into melodic hooks. The title is indeed a reference to the metal band – “I’m a rock star, I could’ve joined Slayer” – but as with everything this guy does, the rock of it all is mostly in his visual presentation, though there is an anarchic energy to his vocals that is kindred in spirit.

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Burial “Chemz”

“Chemz” is an elaborately constructed dance epic that’s built around the ambiguity of whether it’s a song about drugs or a song about love, and nudging you towards the question of whether there’s much of a difference given that either way it’s all chemical reactions in your brain. Burial’s track goes hard with chaotic rave breaks that bring on a heightened level of stimulation – a little bit of panic, a lot of rush. His vocal samples are very inspired, weaving together bits from Ne-Yo, Wolf Alice, and Allure to express a potent mix of joy and paranoia that the joy is about to end. All the lyrics that rise to the surface are about dependence, and worrying what you are without this thing that’s making you feel happy and whole. The feeling of the song doesn’t change but the music mutates quite a bit, shifting through stages of highs and plateaus before abruptly fizzling out, as if the song just passed out on the sidewalk at 4 AM.

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Four Tet “0000 871 0018”

I listened to Four Tet’s 871 before reading the fine print: “recorded between August 1995 and January 1997.” Well, that certainly explains it – the use of live instrumentation, the approximation of that particular Loveless/”To Here Knows When” glimmering sound, the proto-post rock drumming aesthetics. What had initially come off to me as an intriguing detour is in fact Kieran Hebden sharing his juvenilia, which turns out to be far better than many artists in their prime. “0000 871 0018” is the most inspired track in this collection, the one that displays Hebden’s exceptional taste in textures and tones, and is an early indication of his gift for composition. There’s a gentle drama to this one, like it ought to soundtrack a moment of sudden clarity upon encountering something just beyond comprehension.

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Four Tet “Parallel 4”

Parallel comes without caveats or context, so it seems safe to assume this is recent work by Hebden. “Parallel 4” reminds me a lot of the track I featured from the EP he had out under his wingdings name, which makes me think this may in fact be a more evolved version of that song. It doesn’t have the sort of pop bluntness of that song, which I appreciate but can imagine is sort of dull and obvious to him, but I appreciate the relative elegance of this track as it transitions from its beat-centric first part to a more ambient and lovely mid-section.

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The Silhouettes Project featuring Bel Cobain and Lex Amor “At the Bay”

The Silhouettes Project is an interesting premise – it’s not a band or even a collective, but rather an umbrella name that can serve as a “platform” for a community of rap, R&B, and jazz artists in the UK. It’s like a label, but not a label, or a curated compilation that unfolds in real time. It’s an idea with a lot of potential. “At the Bay” is a showcase for the singer Bel Cobain and the rapper Lex Amor, both of whom perform with a stoned, drowsy affect. The track is produced by Illiterate and is built on a keyboard part that reminds me a lot of Massive Attack’s classic “Protection” – it has that same sort of soft but synthetic feel and lazy but crisp beat, making it sound like Cobain and Amor are being lit by dull fluorescent lights. They have excellent chemistry as vocalists, recalling the dynamic of Tricky’s muttered raps and Martina Topley-Bird’s low-key soulfulness on Maxinquaye.

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Taylor Swift “Tis the Damn Season”

“Tis the Damn Season” is like the dark mirror of “Invisible String,” in which the ways two people are tied together are more like a knot of emotional complications than some magical romantic inevitability. The protagonist is a young woman who’s come back to her home town for the holidays who slips back into old feelings for an ex who never left town or moved on. She’s pulled into the gravitational field of their feelings but is incredibly unsure about how close she wants to get to them – “you can call me ‘babe’ for the weekend, ’tis the damn season.”

Even if they are coming on too strong and she’s a bit hesitant, it’s clear enough these two really do love one another. But it’s also apparent that they’re both actually just engaging with their doubts and insecurities about staying or leaving town as the ex tries to hang on tightly to something they thought they’d lost and she worries that she won’t find anyone as eager and accepting somewhere else. Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner attain a very well-calibrated level of melodrama in this song – just enough to sell the weight of the feelings, but reserved enough to keep it centered in the protagonist’s bittersweet ambivalence.

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The Mountain Goats “Get Famous”

The Mountain Goats sound pretty good with a bit of extra razzle dazzle, even if it’s just a horn section added to sell the irony of John Darnielle’s lyrics about aiming to get big in show business. “Get Famous” is sung from the perspective of someone with a burning need to validate their belief that they’re special and that they have a purpose in the world. Darnielle’s lyrics are satirical and mock the most extreme version of this character – a person we surely recognize from magazines, social media, and reality TV – while clearly understanding that he and pretty much every artist can identify with this feeling in some way. This character is personifying all the darkest roots of a need for adulation, all the things the best people tend to tamp down out of self-awareness and humility: A contempt for the “obedient sheep,” a megalomaniacal belief what they do makes the world a better place, faith in the thought that their success is preordained by a higher power.

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Paul McCartney “Winter Bird/When Winter Comes”

“When Winter Comes” is a song that’s been sitting in Paul McCartney’s vaults for 23 years, an outtake from his sessions with George Martin for Flaming Pie. I’m not sure why he didn’t just use it for that record back then, but I’m grateful that he included it in McCartney III rather than relegate it to some bonus track purgatory. It’s an incredibly lovely piece of music – very McCartney in its melodic sensibilities, but somewhat novel in its extreme simplicity. It’s just McCartney doing a little acoustic folk song about tending to a farm, an ode to his rural domesticity and a meditation on the simple pleasures of little routines of being a responsible adult. Even as he sings about chores and tasks there’s a calm, peaceful feeling in this song. He’s escaping all the trappings of being ex-Beatle Paul McCartney to just enjoy being a part of a natural ecosystem and living a humble little life.

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This year’s survey is here, offering a panoramic view of music across the genres through 2020. It’s very long and very thorough, and still somehow only scratches the surface of the full volume of music released over 12 months.

You can find many other playlists I’ve made for both Spotify and Apple Music here.

Warmduscher “Midnight Dipper” (Soulwax Remix)

The original version of Warmduscher’s “Midnight Dipper” isn’t dramatically different from the Soulwax remix – the groove and vocal are about the same, but it’s shorter and a bit more raw. Soulwax stretch the song out and dial the disco way up, and in doing so the song becomes even more strange and silly than it was from the start. The original version was presenting its sleazy character and lewd vibe as a farce, but when the song is pushed to this extreme it just feels genuinely pervy and prurient. Listening to it feels like accidentally entering some kind of Plato’s Retreat-esque swingers club and being stuck between wanting to get out quickly or hang around to see how much weirder it’s going to get.

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Miley Cyrus featuring Joan Jett “Bad Karma”

Miley Cyrus always seems most comfortable singing rock songs, and this makes sense – even though she can competently emote in a more R&B mode, everything that makes her charismatic and exciting as a vocalist is in the grit and raw power of her voice. She effortlessly conveys a lot of core rock values that can be hard to come by in a lot of popular rock music from the past few decades – raw sexuality, attitude, huge untamed emotions, and a touch of camp. Up until recently her career has been a bit confusing because it’s apparent how much she’s had to move away from her strong suit to stay relevant in the market. A lot of her biggest hits have basically been rock songs, but her new album Plastic Hearts is the first to come to the audience with the wild proposition that she’s giving us a big pop record that’s also a big rock record. What a concept, right?

“Bad Karma” is a sleazy rocker with a lascivious “uh huh, uh huh” hook that has a very ‘70s feel but more of a ‘90s alt-rock sense of dynamics as the verses build up tension until Angel Olsen’s guitar part crashes in on the chorus. Cyrus sings the song as a duet with Joan Jett if just to acknowledge how much of the song is owed to her back catalog, but their voices complement each other very well – it’s almost like hearing the same person at different points in her life. They both project a convincing degree of shamelessness in their vocals and that’s really all this song about being a reckless and self-destructive flirt needs to work.

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87dance 팔칠댄스 “Inkwater”

“Inkwater” is in the same aesthetic ballpark as a lot of post-Mac DeMarco drowsy boy psychedelic indie rock, but the bass groove brings the song a bit closer to R&B slow jam territory. So, in other words – they leveled up. The vocals are sung in English, but they’re mostly murmured and purred into the mic, so it almost doesn’t matter. But the lyrics that do rise to the surface are intriguing – for example, “well, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” immediately followed by “never hate on no one” is an interesting progression of thoughts. The chorus hook starts with “I can show you on my melody” and in context I like that as the singer getting a little frustrated with his words and just asking you to pay more attention to the vibe because the sound of it is so much more nuanced than anything he can sing.

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Taylor Swift “Peace” (Pond Lake Studio Version)

On one hand I really appreciate Taylor Swift shifting gears and exploring character-based songwriting, but on the other my two favorite songs on Folklore, the two that are the most resonant for me by far, are “Invisible String” and “Peace,” which are both autobiographical. I love that they both engage with mundane realities of the sort of the sort of heightened romance she wrote about for so long, and in those details you see a deeper love than those older songs ever imagined.

“Peace” is slow and gentle but not quite serene. Aaron Dessner’s arrangement is pared down to just a pensive guitar part and a looped keyboard note that’s both uneasy and lulling, like an error alert receding into background noise. The ample negative space gives Swift room to sing some of the loveliest melodies she’s ever written. (It does not surprise me at all that this is one that Paul McCartney singled out as a favorite.) Even if you knew nothing about her, it’d be easy to intuit that this was a particularly personal song – there’s a nuanced vulnerability in her vocal that feels lived-in and relaxed, and not necessarily performative.

The specifics of “Peace” are not very relatable – she’s basically singing to her partner about the guilt she carries in forcing him to live with the unintended consequences of her immense celebrity. She worries that she’s getting a better deal in the relationship than he is, she’s afraid that the deep connection they have may be spoiled for him having to deal with the burden of dealing with things like paparazzi and tabloids. They can experience intimacy, but total privacy is off the table.

And while most of us will not ever have to contend with these concerns, Swift’s combination of insecurity and genuine appreciation of what she has with her partner is something almost anyone can see themselves in. It’s very easy to sub out the celebrity thing for dealing with mental illness, or any other lingering trouble in one’s life. When it comes down to it, this isn’t really a song about being a celebrity so much as just acknowledging that when people get into relationships they’re signing up to deal with the other person’s mess, and sometime’s someone has more of a mess on their hands than the other. But the point of a good relationship is getting through it together.

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Loony “In Code”

“In Code” is the kind of gospel-based pop song where the tone of the piano chords are so bright that they seem to shine through the speakers. Loony’s voice swings gracefully from soul belting to Beyoncé-esque syncopation, all the while projecting as much warmth and generosity as the chords. It’s not all syrupy sentimentality, though. The verses put all of these kind vibes in the context of day-to-day turmoil bordering on crippling anxiety, so when she sings “coming home never made sense until I found you” in the chorus, the gratitude feels very genuine and hard-earned.

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